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Portfolio Magazine Shut, a Victim of Recession

David Carey, the company's publishing director, and Joanne Lipman, Portfolios editor in chief.
Credit
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Portfolio, the ambitious, glossy business magazine from Condé Nast Publications, closed Monday after just two years. Joanne Lipman, editor in chief, and Tom Wallace, editorial director of Condé Nast, met with editorial staff members and announced that the magazine and its Web site, Portfolio.com, were shutting down, effective immediately.

Most of the $100 million pledged toward the start-up is gone, sunk into the very expensive printing, paper, marketing and editorial costs that go with creating a magazine, especially one published by Condé Nast. The now-folded magazine may be the last of a breed, an attempt by a Manhattan media company to build a large magazine franchise from the ground up.

Senior executives at the company made the decision to close Portfolio last Friday. Ms. Lipman was told to go to the office of S. I. Newhouse at 8:30 a.m. Monday, where he told her. William Li, the publisher, met with the business staff at 9:30, and Ms. Lipman met with her staff at 9:45 and delivered the news. According to people who were there, she was frank in her disappointment at the closing and lavish in her praise. She ordered lunch in for staff members, who were told that they would be permitted to return to their offices until Thursday. In all, approximately 85 people will lose their jobs.

The fact that the April issue, published at a time of maximum business tumult, featured a cover shot of Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska and unsuccessful candidate for vice president, seemed to etch the perils of executing business journalism on a monthly schedule during an era when financial scoops are often measured in seconds. Mr. Wallace, editorial director of Condé Nast, said that Ms. Lipman, who had been criticized during her tenure for odd cover decisions, “was the right editor for Portfolio and created a magazine that Condé Nast was proud to publish.”

In a phone call, Ms. Lipman cited Portfolio’s accomplishments, including a National Magazine Award for its “Briefs” section. “I’m tremendously proud of the magazine and the talented people who worked here,” she said. “We were ahead of the financial crisis, we broke news, and the staff has done exactly what we set out to do.”

The money-losing magazine laid off most of its Web site staff last October and its frequency was reduced to 10 times a year from monthly, but tweaking on the cost side could hardly match the plummet in advertising. With the reduction in frequency, Portfolio advertising revenue was off more than 60 percent in the first quarter. Mr. Newhouse and Charles H. Townsend, president and chief executive, decided that the company could no longer afford to invest in a magazine that showed no sign of overcoming a historic recession in advertising.

“We believed in the editorial concept and still do,” said David Carey, the group publisher at Condé Nast who helped start the magazine. “The problem in terms of the ad franchise was that the timing turned out to be terrible, launching right into the teeth of a very deep recession.”

When Portfolio was conceived in 2005, most start-ups in the journalism space had moved to the Web, and by the time the magazine came out in April 2007, many print publications were already struggling. Condé Nast, which has historically published magazines for years and even decades before they found their footing, apparently no longer has that luxury now that its established magazines are struggling and the more than 30 newspapers owned by its parent company, Advance Publications, are deeply troubled.

In the last several years, the company has closed House & Garden and Jane, opened and then closed Cargo, Vitals and Domino. Men’s Vogue, which was published 10 times a year, became an insert in Vogue Magazine. Of its newer magazines, only Cookie, a parenting magazine, and Teen Vogue continue to publish.

Mr. Carey said that each of the five categories that Portfolio depended on — financial services, business-to-business, automotive, travel and luxury goods — was in retreat, a fact that was reflected by the first-quarter performance of other magazines in the category. BusinessWeek was down 39.8 percent in advertising pages, while Fortune was off 26.3 percent and Forbes was down 15 percent.

Despite cuts at Portfolio, some of the old Condé Nast ways remained. To illustrate a November 2008 article arguing that credit derivatives were “the elephant in the room” at JPMorgan Chase, the magazine spent what one staff member, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said was $30,000 to procure the services of a real elephant to menace a model at a photo shoot.

“There was an atmosphere of unreality to some of it,” said a member of the magazine’s staff, who asked not to be identified in an effort to remain in the good graces of a company that might provide a job. “We did good work here, some of it great, but at a certain point you knew that it was going to end.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on page B6 of the New York edition with the headline: Portfolio Magazine Shut, A Victim of Recession. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe